Life and times

The BBC’S security correspondent reveals the truth about Benedict Allen and touches down in Cairo

The BBC’S security correspondent, Frank Gardner

THE LIST

Reading

The Birds of Panama by George R Angehr and Robert Dean. No, seriously, I am. It’s my pre-trip prep for a forthcoming week in the Panamanian jungle with my elder daughter.

Watching

Doctor Foster on Netflix. Suburban trysts and original plot twists. Brilliantly acted, alarmingly plausible.

Loving

The winter ducks that have made their home on the River Thames. They’ve flown in from Scandinavia, lighting up the river with their flashes of green and purple wings, then landing in a watery flurry of feathers.

Hating

Having to push back the publication date of my next novel to May because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. THE EXPLORER Benedict Allen loves sending himself off into the wilderness. Having worked with him last year on a documentary in Papua New Guinea, I recently found myself covering his disappearance into the jungle there, then interviewing him on his return. He had set off, with a video camera but no phone, to track down a remote community he had lived with 30 years ago in the Central Highlands. With the help of local guides he found them, had a tumultuous reunion, then went down with malaria and grew badly disorientated on the way back. When he failed to show up for a flight, his wife raised the alarm and his agent alerted the newspapers. ‘It’s a publicity stunt,’ was the conclusion of most of my friends. If only. Benedict hardly has a commercial bone in his body; his passion is exploring extreme terrains and he was unaware of the media story about his disappearance. When a resourceful reporter tracked him down in an abandoned missionary station and brought him out by helicopter, Benedict was still labouring under the illusion he could have walked out of there and found his way home. This was unlikely. The next day he was rushed to hospital in Port Moresby, the capital, and dosed up with a cocktail of lifesaving drugs. So, I asked him, will he be taking a satphone next time? That’s a discussion he will now be having with his family.

IT WAS 1AM AND we’d just spilled out of a Cairo airport terminal into the warm Egyptian night when a woman rushed towards us. She went straight past and kissed the hand of a man robed entirely in black, her face a mask of ecstasy. It was Bishop Angaelos, the newly appointed Coptic Bishop of London, and we had come to Egypt for Radio 4’s Today programme to witness his official ‘elevation’ by the Coptic Pope. It was an extraordinarily moving ceremony, a dazzling display of religious devotion in a desert monastery by members of the largest Christian community left in the Middle East. And I use the word ‘left’ deliberately. Like the Christians of Syria and Iraq, Egypt’s Coptic Christians are having a tough time. Their churches have been bombed by Isil, a priest has been knifed and Copts complain of constant discrimination. Yet I found them to possess a rare capacity to forgive. They also struck me as surprisingly modern. I’m not quite sure what I expected to find in an Egyptian monastery, but it probably wasn’t the sight of several dozen monks all trying to take selfies with their Pope on their mobiles.

TO PARLIAMENT for a conference, which I then managed to miss most of. I do enjoy going to Portcullis House, the soulless, modernist annex to the Gothic splendour of the Palace of Westminster. Once you’re through security you bump into all sorts of people in the cafeteria. Not that long ago I came across Boris Johnson. ‘I seem to be quite free these days,’ he admitted then. The next day he became Foreign Secretary. This time the most interesting conversations I had were with the heavily armed policemen pacing up and down between MPS and civil servants. We discussed the pros and cons of their new Swiss-made Sig Sauer assault rifles. Fearsome to look at, it turns out these weapons are of such small calibre they can’t always be relied upon to take down a terrorist first time. I don’t know whether I should be more concerned about that or the fact that a policeman with an assault rifle in Parliament has become a normal sight these days. Frank Gardner is the author of the bestselling novel Crisis (Bantam Press, £7.99)

Several dozen monks were trying to take selfies with the Coptic Pope on their mobiles